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Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings
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Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings is a 2007 documentary purporting to show the 10 "best" (i.e. most inexplicable) UFO sightings. This was made by asking UFO enthusiasts for their 10 best/favourite cases and sightings, assigning them arbitrary point values and averaging to get a final list of 10. Science!
If you like your UFO documentaries on the unpolished side, look no further. The graphics have a late-90s Nintendo game feel. The interviews are an endless parade of wrinkly old men. The narrator sounds as if she's doing an impression of Dana Scully dosed with codeine, which renders it all but unwatchable. At one point, someone pronounces the word "nuclear" as "new-cu-lar". And there's plenty of awkward panning over military stock photos
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Description[edit]
The schlockumentary makes the usual claims. For instance, noting that if you shoehorn enough, "UFO" sightings actually go back to antiquity, but were simply misunderstood as miracles or demonic sightings. And totally not both phenomena being people trying to explain things they didn't understand in ways that made sense to people of the time.
When asked a question on why UFO sightings have increased so dramatically over the last half century, instead of proffering a sensible answer like "the rise in population", "the wider record-keeping" or "the more effective media", Stanton Friedman instead suggests that it's obviously aliens checking up on us in case we nuke them.[note 1]
Incredibly, the "#1 best UFO sighting" is awarded to a 1957 report by the crew of an RB-47 military aircraft on a training mission out of Forbes AFB in Topeka, Kansas, who said their aircraft was followed by a UFO for a distance of over 700 miles.
UFO skeptics (such as the actual US Air Force) long ago concluded that the RB-47 crew had tracked an airliner.[1][2] Despite this, Best Evidence treats it as if it's unsolved and very mysterious, and, apparently by their own admission, their best evidence for UFOs=aliens.
The film features the ubiquitous Stanton Friedman (who's cheerfully appeared in every UFO documentary made since the Boer War), alongside "UFO expert" Nick Pope, and several other equally earnest UFO proponents.
External links[edit]
- Best Evidence on Vimeo (free to watch in all its 47-minute glory)
- Best Evidence: Top 10 UFO Sightings on IMDb
Notes[edit]
- ↑ Because the technology required to traverse the universe is no match for our A-bombs!